Gersey return with a littlebit of tweaking

Mon 14th Aug, 2006 in Features

Melbourne band Gersey has teamed up with Magic Dirt bassist-turned producer Dean Turner to deliver their third long player, No Satellites, and his ear for detail has helped fine tune the five-piece’s rock/pop sound.

It has taken the band four years to put together a follow up to 2002’s Storms Dresses As Stars after one false start and thoughts of breaking up threatened the project. Guitarist Matt Davis said the band were ready to call it quits after they prematurely entered the recording studio with producer Wayne Connolly and realised they still didn’t have enough good material to make a record after more than two years of writing.

“We talked about it,” he admits. “I think every band comes to that even after one recording. It all comes down to: have you got anything else to say, have you got anything else to add to music and to culture? We asked ourselves those questions, as I think any artist should do, and we felt that we did and we felt that the songs we had half way through the record were the best songs that we’d done.

“We owed it to ourselves to make sure we continued on and released it, and I think the results speak for themselves.”

Davis believes No Satellites was the hardest album they have had to write in their nine-year long career. “There were parts that were easy and just dropped out of the sky. Songs you’ll do from time to time, but generally it was a fairly laborious process because we set such high ideals and goals for ourselves. When we didn’t reach them we kept pushing and pushing and kept writing. The actual songs that are on the record didn’t take that much writing, but it took a lot of other songs and a lot of time to get to those songs. For every song that is on the record there is probably three that were dropped halfway through the writing process,” he said.

“We were quite excited about working with Wayne Connolly. We’ve been fans of his for a long time and he has been a friend for a long time. But a week or so before we were going to go in, we felt we didn’t have enough material that we really loved. There were six songs I thought were great and the others weren’t fully realised songs. We wanted every song to be a significant song and that is where the title comes from. In many ways, No Satellites means every song should be its own sort of thing.”

Gersey couldn’t wait for the record to be finished before they released something new for their fans and so they entered a local recording studio named Birdland with Turner (The Red Sun Band) to record a four-track EP Eyes Are Wide Tonight (2005), which was their first release on their new label Inertia since their contract with Trifecta ran out.

Forming in 1997, Gersey was heavily influenced by the shoegaze movement on their previous two records, but they have attempted to shy away from its characteristics on No Satellites and Eyes Are Wide Tonight, which share the tracks ‘Small Change’ and ‘Girl Is My Gun’. There is less distortion, less fuzziness and a more clear and crisper sound.

Davis said recording with an accomplished musician such as Turner was one of the reasons for the change. “He has got great ears and great ears for tuning, so he was much harder on us on tuning then we have bothered about being in the past. We wanted to be more precise on this record and wanted the songs to be a bit more precise and a bit more dominant. Less subtlety and less room for misunderstanding, so Dean quite rightly said, “you should nail your tunings down” and we just spent more time making sure things were in tune and making sure parts were fitting together, where before we would just have this mess. We became a bit more considered about it and those things,” he explains.

“But I must confess, my personal feeling, and I think this is shared by some of the band at least, is that I kind of like it when some of the tuning is a little bit out and I like some of that grey area and that is certainly part of our sound, perhaps our sound particularly early on. That is a very sort of Pavement indie rock sound.”

The band’s long time friend Tim Whitten, who mixed their last two albums, was called in to make sure Gersey’s new sound still reflected their past. “We love the way he mixes. He is like a painter. He understands all the different parts and he creates this one piece out of everything that is presented to him. He was a perfect choice to pull this new, more strident sort of sounds, but still diffuse it with the Gersey parts he knows so well,” Davis said.

Gersey are hitting the road with No Satellites next month, for the dates keep on scrolling:

September 7: Ruby’s Lounge, Belgrave, VIC.
September 15: Northcote Social Club, VIC.
September 16: Jade Monkey, Adelaide, SA.
September 22: Globe Theatre, Fortitude Valley.
September 29: Hyde Park, Perth, WA.
September 30: Wave Rock Festival.October 1: Mojos, Fremantle, WA. October 6: Newtown, Sydney, NSW.